Book review: Post-Digital Print – the Mutation of Publishing Since 1894

Post-Digital Print – the Mutation of Publishing Since 1894, by Alessandro Ludovico.

You can get them on amazon UK and USA.

Publisher Onomatopee writes: In this post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun.

Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over?

In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than twenty years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.

Michael Mandiberg, Old News, 2011

The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894… I won’t hold it against you if you tell me that this sound austere. This book is however a joy to read. It is entertaining, impeccably researched and written in a compelling style. Alessandro Ludovico blends together retro-futuristic drawings, theory, anecdotes, art works and personal observations to narrate the paper vs pixel battle and ultimately kick off a discussion about the role of print in digital times. To be honest, i knew Ludovico would write a good book about the issue because i’ve followed his many activities and researches in the field for a number of years now but i had no idea i’d have so much fun reading it. I can’t remember having had in my hands a book that made my brain go from quotes by Clay Shirky, Marissa Mayer, Jorge Luis Borges, Vuk Cosic, or Cory Doctorow to stories about keitai shousetsu, Paulo Coelho’s call to ‘pirate’ books, Amazon erasing from your Kindle the copies of George Orwell’s books ‘while you were sleeping’, Daniel Vydra’s New York Times Roulette, artistic imitation of banknotes, Sniffin’ Glue punk zines, mail art, etc. Add to that the odd flashback (for example the magazines that used to be sold with a floppy disk containing ‘bonus’ content) that reminds you how fast the publishing world has to adapt in order to keep on attracting readers.

Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink

Villemard, En L’An 2000, 1910. At School. Photo

Stencil duplicator or mimeograph machine

The first chapter, “The death of paper (which never happened)” analyzes 7 moments in history when a new medium has been heralded as a superior alternative to paper. Chapter 2,”A history of alternative publishing reflecting the evolution of print”, looks at how artistic avant-gardes have been using print throughout the 20th century. The third chapter, “The mutation of paper: material paper in immaterial times”, explores the reasons why paper still makes sense in our digital age. Chapter 4, “The end of paper: can anything actually replace the printed page?”, take a critical look at electronic devices, strategies and platforms. The Fifth Chapter, “Distributed archives: paper content from the past, paper content for the future”, explores the long-term implication of choosing a medium rather than the other one. The final chapter, “The network: transforming culture, transforming publishing” explains how much quality cultural entities can gain from working as a network.

I’ve been particularly fascinated by the Appendix which brings side by side the world of print and the digital world to highlight their similarities and differences: shelf space vs web host storage space, shipping strike vs no connection, smell of ink vs sound of clicks, etc.

Post-Digital Print is a book i’d recommend to bloggers, journalists, writers, publishers, designers (of the physical and the ‘immaterial’ alike), and to anyone who wants to be able to shine at elegant dinners when the conversation turns to questions such as “what’s more eco-friendly? is it the print or the digital?’ “Will printed magazines disappear in the coming years?” “Is The Pirate Bay killing the publishing industry?”

Alessandro Ludovico’s affection for paper and enthusiasm for pixel culture are illustrated by the way the book is distributed: you can either buy it from the publisher or download it as a free PDF.

And because Alessandro Ludovico is the founder and editor of the magazine Neural, he illustrated many of the observations, facts and ideas about post-digital print with a series of artworks. Here’s a couple i discovered along the pages:

The Quick Brown monitored Fox News regularly and highlighted changes made on the headlines over the course of the day.

Jonathan Puckey, The Quick Brown

Pamphlet: people typed a message on a computer. As they pressed the ‘send’ button, the message was printed and dropped as a pamphlet from the 10th floor of the building.